Kingston Tech is not the only SSD manufacturer now bringing out USB 3.0 external drives. Iomega’s unimaginatively named SSD Flash Drive comes in three capacities: 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. With the latter costing £624, it's a purchase that demands a significant leap of faith.
iomega SSD
Iomega's SSD Flash Drive joins the …

COMMENTS

That's 238.4GB

I still blame Iomega for claiming that 1MB=1,000,000 bytes, henceforth making it a de facto standard. Bastards, I'll never forgive them. That and the click of death. And the subsequent denial. And my 250GB drive dying. And my 750MB drive consistently killing my 250MB disks. It took me a while to learn my lesson, but I'll never buy from them again. Especially at this price!

aaah

Not all hosts are equal

You need a decent host to get all of the USB 3.0 goodness - an express card connection is going to be limited to the 2.5Gbps connection for a start. You'll need at least 2 lanes of PCIe Gen2 or one of PCIe Gen3 before you can fill the USB 3.0 pipe.

There are very few USB 3.0 hosts on the market at the moment which can saturate the link, and the sort of figures you are seeing are typical of some of the poorer ones (which max out at around 130MBps).

unimpressed

i won't buy Iomega, i have in the past and they've always failed. How can you trust an HD manufacturer who don't even know how many megs in a gig ?

A faster cheaper option than this effort would be get the Corsair 64Gn SSD (285/275Mb/sec r/w) and a cheap external case, and best of all you would be funding a crap company with over priced poor quality products :-)

This is the pricing on the tech that is supposed to bury

Can we get more tests?

Say, same drive on USB2 as well as same contained SSD (what's inside this chassis) connected to eSATA and Firewire 800. Lets also see USB3 compared based on a common USB3 including chipset, a USB3 card in a 1x slot, and a USB3 card in a full performance PCI configuration.

In 90% of cases, USB3 is capped at PCI1x speed anyway, then add in controller, OS, and CPU overhead, and they perform at barely more (if at all) SATA speeds... Why pay so much more for USB 3 (and add yet another port), where eSATA is so close in speed as to be (in the near term) irrelevant, except for people moving TB at a time, which can;t be done with these small drives anyway....